The Poison of Ivy

by Jessica King

  “Man down behind the door,” Vince said.

  “I’ll take the hallway, you get the kitchen,” Ivy said, walking toward the dark hallway. She pressed her back to the wall and slid until she was across from the first doorway. She walked in. The room was a mess. Suitcases and clothes and books and blankets were strewn across the room. But it was clear.

  “Bedroom one clear,” Ivy called.

  “Kitchen clear,” Vince yelled back.

  Ivy returned to the hallway. One more bedroom, then the bathroom. She could already see into the second bedroom, though. It was entirely empty beyond several broken-down cardboard boxes and a rather extravagant cat castle. She checked the closet. Empty. “Bedroom two clear.”

  “Bathroom clear.”

  She met Vince in the hallway. They checked pulses, found wallets, and reported in. Ivy fished for the teen’s wallet. “Blake Leonard,” she said. “Nineteen.”

  Vince shook his head, opening the other man’s billfold. “Forty-five ACP,” Vince said, motioning to the gun that was an inch or so away from the dead man’s fingertips. He pulled out a driver’s license. “Reid Carter.”

  “Reid?” Ivy said.

  “He’s the right age and look of our suspect for Becca’s killer,” Vince said, remembering the text messages they’d found on the young woman’s phone.

  “But then, who killed him?”

  “We’ve got someone finding the owner of the house right now, but this doesn’t exactly fit our regular witches’ houses,” Vince said. He was right. The place was clearly a bachelor’s pad. Well, not a “pad,” really, Ivy thought, more like a bachelor’s crash landing. Along the far wall was a stack of empty pizza boxes, and his room had been essentially a hoarder’s nest that had recently exploded. The furniture was beat up; the only thing of real value seemed to be the television and the gaming system.

  Ivy’s phone rang. “Chief?”

  “Edward Thorne killed the two men in the home you’re in right now.”

  Edward Thorne, Edward Thorne. She ran the name through her mind, landing on the post she’d seen on the original Kingsman site. “He was a target for the Kingsmen,” Ivy said. “Do you think he’s taking them out?”

  “Perhaps you should come talk to him,” Chief Marks said.

  “He’s there?” Ivy asked.

  “He’s here to turn himself in.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Monday, March 13, 2017, 7:30 p.m.

  “Does the word ‘package’ sound too … marketing-y?” Delilah asked. She twirled a box in her hand, dressed in her signature green packaging. She loved the smell of fresh cardboard, and she took a deep breath.

  “What about the word collection?” Ransom was sifting his way through orders, removing address labels from their sticker pages, and pressing them onto each green box and bag.

  Delilah pointed at him. “Yes,” she said. She yawned, double-checking the address before she stuck it to the box in front of her—the ARE YOU A WITCH KIT had been selling out—they could barely get them produced in time to send out within an even reasonable time frame, let alone the speedy shipping she’d promised.

  “Yawns are contagious,” Ransom said through a yawn. Delilah shook her head back and forth, trying to wake herself up. ‘We’re going to need to bring more people in on this operation if we’re going to keep expanding like this, Lilah.”

  Delilah knew that. She hadn’t expected things to take off quite this quickly, but her plan to market to covens had suddenly exploded with the reveal of Aline Rousseau being a witch herself. A stroke of luck for her.

  Ransom tugged a basket of rose quartz rocks toward himself. “Did you do the blessing for these?” he asked.

  Delilah yawned again. What did it matter if she said anything to the rocks? It was more important that people just believed she did, so they would use them, tell people about them, buy more. She lifted a hand over the basket. “Hope they find love and get prettier,” she said.

  Ransom chuckled and Delilah shrugged. She’d always found the idea of Wicca practices to be interesting, at least, but she didn’t particularly care for the practices so much—the rules and the constant need to find symbols and acquire materials.

  But wannabe witches dished out money, which was what made the witchcraft practice most magical to Delilah.

  “Thinking about releasing a line of magic wands,” Delilah said absently. “We could make what? Maybe a green plastic one with a gold handle and a glass one with a green handle?” She stuck another label to a package. “I think that would be a big seller.”

  “Cheap to make,” Ransom said.

  “Hmm.” Delilah pulled her short hair up into a ponytail. Half of it fell immediately from the elastic, not long enough to stay caught behind her head. She sighed. If only there really was a magic spell to make it grow faster. She used her own Hair Growth Potion shampoo, but it was more for the smell of it, lavender. When she and Ransom had chosen the ingredients, they went with “cheap, but earthy,” to try to make a shampoo that witches would pay for and would believe was truly concocted for growth. They’d quickly found out that if something smelled earthy, witches would believe Delilah herself had stood over a pot and cooked it. They’d believe Delilah frolicked through the forest and picked the lavender just for them. “We could make pen-size versions of the wands, too,” she said. “Some sort of writing spell?”

  “Communication spell?” Ransom asked.

  “That’s good,” Delilah said. She shifted forward onto her knees and reaching up for the whiteboard, jotting down the idea.

  They were silent for a moment, Ransom filing their new idea away in his phone. Delilah yawned again.

  “You’re bored by this,” Ransom said. Delilah didn’t want to admit it, but she was quickly headed that way. She’d always been easily bored by maintenance. It was what made her a good entrepreneur—her insatiable love for starting something, watching people fall in love with her ideas. But she had a strong following now. There were accounts online that had gone beyond their magical practices and had started to worship her. She’d played her role almost too well.

  “This has been the most profitable thing we’ve done, though,” she said. Delilah and Ransom had grown up in a poor part of L.A. The part that no tourists came through. The part that celebrities pretended didn’t exist as they threw their money at more lavish charitable cases than the need in their own backyards. Delilah and Ransom had found that they could weasel their way into—or out of—anything they wanted at a young age and knew they’d found the way to make their million—each other.

  “Look, if we sell the company and the image of the Prophetess, it’ll have been worth it, but the company would burn to the ground without you in the role of Prophetess, and now everyone knows your face.”

  They had debated on that every day for weeks. Delilah was a natural when it came to the image of the Prophetess character and her brand. But if Delilah used her image now, she might never be able to be the face of a company again. They’d auditioned actresses, but no one had pulled it off correctly, and Delilah decided to take the shot anyway. They added the wig and heavy makeup, but her face had become a national icon.

  “In ten years, I’ll look entirely different,” Delilah said, waving him off.

  “Do you want to sell?” Ransom asked.

  Delilah shook her head. The money was too good, and she did love being the Prophetess. She loved the energy of the live crowds and feeling like she was somehow leading them. “It’s just that—”

  Recognition donned on Ransom’s face. “The musical is done?”

  Delilah nodded. She’d only told Ransom once they’d taken the turn into their twenties that she’d always wanted to be on Broadway. The Prophetess role had been a taste of what it might be like. She’d been writing music for a long time, and she’d told him a year ago that not only did she want to perform—but she’d been working on a musical.

  But musicals did better on the east coast. And things like the Prophet
ess brand sold much better on the west coast. In L.A., she was a rock star. In the nonconformist guidelines of the northeast and the Bible belt of the southeast, she was either ridiculous or taboo or both.

  “There’s no way to know if the musical would make any money,” Delilah said. “I don’t know if it’s, you know, great. But it’s good. I know it’s good.”

  “So, what’s the plan?” Ransom asked. “We milk the Prophetess gig until it phases out, then move to New York?”

  “You’d move to New York with me?” Delilah asked. She searched Ransom’s face. Delilah didn’t have a real family, though Ransom had taken over as a sort of brother and eventual business partner. She’d grown up with a single father who found her to be more like a pet who needed to be cleaned and fed, but Ransom had a mother and sister who regularly called him, asked him to come home for dinner, needed him to do things like fix appliances and diagnose car problems.

  He grinned. “Cast me in your musical.”

  She laughed. Ransom was a great actor, as all men who started conning people in single-digit ages were, but he was undeniably tone-deaf. “Never.”

  +++

  Monday, March 13, 2017, 8:50 p.m.

  “Is it offensive to say he really, really doesn’t look like someone capable of multiple murders?” Vince murmured.

  Ivy couldn’t disagree. Through the double glass, Edward Thorne, slumped against one of the chairs in the questioning room, his cuffed hands in front of him on the table, looked anything but dangerous. He had dark hair, overgrown and curling. Tall and barrel-chested and covered in plaid. Despite the fact that he looked like a bear, he had the type of kind face that had Ivy incapable of imagining him killing anyone.

  “I’ll go first,” Ivy said. She walked into the interrogation room, catching the attention of Edward.

  “I gave my cat to the police chief,” Edward said. “He said you would find a home for Timothy?” The fact that this was his first concern further made Ivy feel as though he weren’t a serial killer.

  “Can you tell me why you turned yourself in?” Ivy asked.

  Edward dropped his head. “I’m being hunted.”

  “Who is hunting you?”

  “The Kingsmen. I said I wanted out, but that’s not how they work.” Ivy tapped her fingers on her knees. She knew there had to be Kingsmen who lost the initial bloodlust the cult gave them at first. And now they had one here.

  “How do they work?” she asked.

  Edward looked at her, his eyes narrowing. “If you decide to stop killing, they’ll kill you, Detective.” He shook his head. “It’s not that complicated.”

  Ivy ignored the slight. “And the two bodies we found in your house—they were trying to kill you?”

  Edward didn’t meet her eyes. “Reid was. At least, that was the name on his driver’s license. But I didn’t kill the kid. Reid killed him. Dunno why.”

  “Probably didn’t want a witness,” Ivy said.

  “My guess, too,” Edward said. He looked around the room, his eyes searching like he wished for some sort of plant or poster to analyze instead of the tabletop in front of him, which was a rather unexciting metal gray.

  “So, you want to go to jail so you won’t die?” Ivy asked.

  Edward looked up at her, his eyes cold. “What other choice do I have?” he asked. “If I continued the way I was, I’d end up either killing more people or getting shot. Both of those paths … I can’t. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Asking for help automatically means being arrested. I know what I’ve done, Detective. I’m not going to be hiding that. So yes, I want to go to jail so I won’t die.”

  Ivy decided it was best not to tell him about Lee Patterson.

  “And you’re confessing to the murders of Amber Woodward, Erin Preston, Andrea Jones, Reid Carter, and the attempted murder of Jennings Ford? As well as breaking and entering Erin Preston’s hotel room and likely a stalking charge because of the video with Jennings Ford’s children in which you showed a weapon to the camera?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s quite a rap sheet.”

  He didn’t respond. He simply looked at the handcuffs like he couldn’t believe he’d done all those things. Edward looked at his fingers, picking at his cuticles and sliding his nails under one another like he could still feel blood on his hands.

  “You’ll still have to go before a judge to be convicted.”

  “I know that.” He picked at the creases on his palms. “Can you make sure no one in the jury is a Kingsman?” He swallowed, and his hands stilled. “I’m worried they’ll try to kill me before I can make it to jail.”

  “I don’t pick the jury, but I’ll be sure to pass that along,” Ivy said. “Are you requesting that while you are in remand, you be held in prison and not under house arrest?”

  “Yes,” he said. His voice was pleading.

  Ivy nodded abruptly. She’d never heard someone ask for prison with such … desperation. She turned the corner, going back into the room behind the double-paned glass. She and Vince remained silent as they watched Edward lean his head on the table and cry.

  “Vince, some of these people aren’t bad.”

  “Killing Reid could be considered self-defense, but he’s looking at a life sentence for the other three.”

  “I know,” Ivy said. “I’m not saying he shouldn’t have his sentence. But I’m saying without the brainwashing of the Kingsmen …”

  Vince didn’t finish her sentence the way he normally did. They both knew what she meant. Without the brainwashing of the Kingsmen, Edward Thorne might have been an entirely normal person. A normal person who would never kill someone for his entire life.

  Later that night, Ivy watched a video online—a UCLA psychology professor and a behavior and social scientist with the CDC analyzed the Kingsmen as a “public health concern.”

  “They are recruiting in huge numbers, turning people against members of local so-called ‘covens’—often young women. It’s causing violence, death threats, fear, and distrust among communities across the country, and I’ve seen the effects of it in L.A.”

  A middle-aged man, who was labeled as “Dr. Andrew J. Wilkins, Professor of Psychology,” shook his head.

  Ivy recognized the last name. This was the professor Mason had consulted with about his going undercover within the Kingsmen ranks.

  “Right, Andrew. I think what people aren’t realizing is that both of these groups have both their outspoken and very public members—who show their faces and go to public gatherings. But there are also people who identify as magically gifted who practice in their basements and Kingsmen who would never admit their alliances to even their family members!”

  The CDC scientist, with the name “Angelina Lynn, CDC Social Scientist,” scrolling beneath her face, held out her hands as if she were weighing the outward participants and those hiding their allegiances in either of her palms.

  “My students don’t trust one another enough to give their personal opinions on the matter,” the professor said. “It’s upsetting to see them talk about an issue they’re clearly passionate about—it is overwhelmingly affecting people their age right now considering the target age of Prophetess followers. And it’s even more upsetting to see them refuse to trust me. They turn in papers, and particularly some of my brightest female students who I’m used to hearing solid, eloquent opinions from—they turn in bland papers about this phenomenon unfolding before their eyes and social media feeds. But who could blame them? As far as they know, I could very well be one of those men looking to kill these magic-practicers. Even if they aren’t witches, it’s likely they know people who are, and they don’t want to appear biased and end up dead themselves. It’s that prevalent, Angelina.”

  The woman nodded her agreement. “And, as a psychology professor, I’d love to hear your take on the rather videogame-esque treatment of this Kingsmen ‘leaderboard.’ Do you think that’s a contributing factor for the motivation behind the Kingsmen's actions?


  “Unfortunately, I do,” Wilkins said. “Especially for these newer Kingsmen who are seeing their hobby—gaming—being used as a sort of template for this group. For people who have regularly worked on achieving and maintaining high scores against strangers in videogames, this might seem like a 4D experience to them, and they haven’t quite come to understand the gravity of the situation. By making the killing a competitive game-like experience, new Kingsmen are being fueled by that mental reward system that they would be experiencing at a lower level during gameplay. It’s quite fascinating.”

  “It is indeed!” Lynn said. “So, what is the fix here? Is there a simple way to stop it?”

  Wilkins pressed his lips together. “Now that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” He said. “If we are going to look at it from this sort of serotonin-filled reward system, it’s already going to be difficult to break people away from. That’s what keeps a majority of our youth up late into the night playing games—that immediate gratification, right? What gets gamers to stop playing games is usually one of three options. One, a new game comes out. Now, we hope that no new killing cult is going to be coming around, finding a target the way the Kingsmen have. Or two, gamers stop seeing improvements in their scores. Now, for this, they are always going to see improvement as their so-called score is going to go up with each kill. So, three, even as their score goes up, these killers might realize they are so far out of reach of the leaderboard—and any recognition that might bring—that they give up.

  However, even if every Kingsmen reaches this point of giving up, the recruitment process is always onboarding more members, so it would be difficult for this point of giving up to eventually dry out the supply of Kingsmen entirely.” Wilkins held up a fourth finger. “But that leads us to the final phase of this, an option not factored into regular gameplay, which is fear. Because even if a Kingsmen becomes immune to the mental gratification of progress in this video game-like setup or find a new hobby, even if they ignore the improvement of their scores as they kill, and even if they become discouraged by how far behind other Kingsmen they are in relation to the leaderboard … we’ve received reports from anonymous sources that if you have made your first kill and decide you don’t want to keep going as an “activated, killing Kingsmen,” you get put on the kill list yourself.”